Merely building a website and monetizing it, is not enough to make such a site become an income generator if there is no conscious effort on the part of the site owner or affiliate marketer to take some steps towards driving traffic to the site. A very important strategy used in pulling traffic or sending visitors to a website is "Article Marketing." This entails providing useful information about the theme or topic of a website and posting it to article directories, where webmasters can find and use the article on their site, and were other visitors can see the article and follow the link to a website provided by the article writer. Article marketing methods that can increase affiliate sales are as follows:

1. One way to earn more affiliate commission through article marketing is to give your article a touch of professionalism i.e. making sure the article is of high grammatical standard. A properly written article gives a reader an impression of proficiency and competence about the article author. A good practice that guarantees a standard article is that after writing the article, the author should endeavor to read through the article again, to check if there are any spelling or grammatical errors to be rectified.

2. Another lesson to note about writing good articles is that the ultimate goal and purpose of article marketing is to provide useful or valuable content to readers of the article, so that such readers can gain confidence and trust in the author, thereby making them inclined and disposed towards following the link to the writer's website. To achieve this, the writer should ensure that the article is not an advert i.e. does not contain a sales pitch of his site's product. Therefore one attribute of a good article is that the writer's website address or link should not appear in the body of the article, rather the right place to include it is the author's resource box provided at the bottom of the article.

3. Again, the effectiveness of article marketing lies in volume of articles and the frequency with which articles are posted to article directories. The writer should avoid the temptation of hoping that writing one or two articles will guarantee the result he anticipates. The only way to generate good traffic and earn affiliate commission through articles is by posting a lot of content rich articles; nevertheless, immediate or instant result may not follow since it may take time for articles to be spread around the internet and get picked by webmasters or publishers; but overtime, the writer's effort will eventually be rewarded with free and steady traffic to his website. It is therefore advisable to write and post at least one or two articles weekly to article directories for effective result.

4. Another way to optimize the use of articles in driving traffic to a website is through the use of keyword optimized affiliate site address or link in the author's resource box. The best reference of himself that the article writer can provide in the resource box should be a link or address to his site that is keyword optimized; this makes it possible for search engines to easily index his site for search results relating to those keywords; this guarantees more exposure for the author's website and consequently more sales and affiliate commission.

5. One of the chief aims of writing and submitting articles to article directories is, to enable webmasters or publishers to find and use it as content for their website. To encourage publishers to pick ones article for use on their site, the article writer is advised not to include his affiliate link in the body of the article since publishers don't like the idea of seeing links to websites on the article. As stated above, the appropriate location to include link to the website of the writer is the resource box at the bottom of the article.